Presently, a subtractive tri-primary color process has been employed in the silver halide light-sensitive color photography, and a color image is formed from the combination of three dye images reduced from a yellow dye-forming coupler, a magenta dye image-forming coupler and a cyan dye image-forming coupler.
As the conventional magenta dye image-forming coupler used in the conventional silver halide light-sensitive photographic materials, pyrazolone-type, pyrazolinobenzimidazole-type and indanone-type couplers are known and, among them, various kinds of 5-pyrazolone derivatives are used widely.
As for the substituent at 3-position of the 5-pyrazolone cycle of the above-mentioned 5-pyrazolone derivative, for example, alkyl group, aryl group, alkoxy group disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 2,439,098, acylamino group disclosed in US. Pat. Nos. 2,369,489 and 2,600,788, and ureide group disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,558,319. However, coupling activities of these couplers with the oxidation product of a developing agent is relatively low. and, therefore, there have been defects that it is difficult to obtain a magenta dye image with high density, that the magenta dye image obtained by color development has a large secondary absorption in the blue light region and that sharpness of the absorption spectrum of the main absorption of the dye image on the long wavelength side is not very clear.
A 3-anilino-5-pyrazolone type coupler as disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,311081, 3,677,764 and 3,684,514; British patents No. 956,261 and No. 1,173,513 have an advantage that the coupling activity is high, that they can give high density image and that unnecessary absorption in the red-light region is small, however, since the primary absorption of the conventionally known 3-anilino-5-pyrazolone-type coupler resides relatively in the short wavelength region and, therefore, when they are used in the negative-type silver halide light-sensitive photographic materials, color reproduction property is deteriorated.
For the purpose improving these defects, various attempts have been made and, for example, a 1-pentahalogenophenyl-3-anilino-5-pyrazolone-type coupler has been proposed in Japanese Patent O.P.I. Publication No. 52-80027(1977). This type of coupler has high coupling reactivity, being capable of giving high density image and having excellent spectroscopic property, however, there is a defect that when the coupler is stored in the presence of formalin gas, image density is lowered.
Further, it has been clarified that the light-sensitive material which comprises this type of pyrazolone-type coupler has a problem that photographic properties can easily change. In recent years, industrial demand for the improvement of the photographic properties of the silver halide light-sensitive photographic material has become increasingly stricter and commercial goods which have homogeneous property between lots or with lapse of time during storage. Still more, with realization of silver-saving or thin-layered silver halide light-sensitive color photographic materials, fluctuation of the photographic properties during storage tend to be large and, therefore, development of silver halide light-sensitive color photographic materials with less fluctuation in the photographic properties with the lapse of time, or photographic materials having improved preservation property before exposure during storage have strongly been demanded.